Please feel free to add your useful VCL snippets to the page.

This page holds (links to) useful VCL examples.

Attention: As of 2.1.0, obj.* is called beresp.* in vcl_fetch, and obj.* is now read-only.

VCL Examples

• The Default VCL with examples and a graphical overview of how a request goes through all the VCL hooks.
• Purging (also see the FAQ)
• Using restarts to protect from Apache error codes of 5xx
• Using restarts to try multiple backends
• Using directors for load balancing
• Caching even when cookies are present
• Caching content for logged in users or content based on cookie settings
• How to cache things longer on Varnish than the client
• Removing some, but not all cookies
• Enable force-refresh from clients
• Redirect using VCL
• How to ignore cache headers from the backend
• Log to syslog using VCL and embedded C
• Useful bits if you are using pipe
• Adding a header indicating hit/miss & extended diagnostics
• Grace - Handling backend failures and expired objects gracefully
• Saint Mode - Holding off backend requests for a specific object for a while
• How to avoid hotlinking to your site
• An example showing how Varnish can change your web server signature
• Redirecting the browser to another hostname
• Normalizing req.url
• Setting ttl in Varnish based on a header
• Normalize Accept-Language header
• Strip Google Adwords "gclid" parameter from bought Analytics tagged traffic
• Set Expires header based on max-age in Cache-Control

VCL Real World Examples

Below are full VCL's used already in live production systems.

These should only be used as a reference to help build your own VCL!

• Submitted by alexc - 25-09-2009 - varnish 2.0.4 stable

VCL Syntax

Manually maintained syntax description of VCL

• Varnish 1.1 source:branches/1.1/lib/libvcl/syntax.txt
• Varnish 1.2 source:branches/1.2/lib/libvcl/syntax.txt

Note: This document has been removed from trunk (which has a number of VclSyntaxChanges).